11-13-24 - 7am - Civil Service

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
You also know that Pete Hegseth is a great appointment
for Secretary of Defense because people like Joy Read, Jim Acosta,
and Elizabeth Warren are going berserk about this appointment. These
are the same people who were cheering on Pete Buddhagic

(00:20):
who was appointed Secretary of Transportation by Biden because hey,
Pete likes trades, so that was his qualification.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
I think that the people on MSNBC and CNN are
going up, They're going ballistic because they see Pete Hegsath
as a Fox News contributor, one dimensional. That's all they
see him as. They don't see anything else.

Speaker 3 (00:43):
But I want to go back.

Speaker 2 (00:44):
I want to address this and I want to swerve
into the whole Uh elon Musk and the vake Ramaswami,
but what their goals are too. But let's go back
to the very basic question. Uh, let's see Gouber number
seventy nine and forty six, Mike, why can't we fire them?

(01:05):
Because you have layer upon layer of laws, rules and
regulations that let's start to just basic civil service. You
get a job as a GS five doing something in
let me just use online security as an example, So

(01:27):
you become a GS five in homeland security, and you're
a date entry individual. I mean, I don't again, don't
don't hold me to the GS levels and don't hold
me to the job descriptions. I'm just trying to give
you a general, broad idea. So you get hired, and

(01:50):
one of the first things that's going to occur. For example,
I had simply within my one fourth of homeland I had,
on any given day somewhere between eighteen and thirty bargaining
units of unions to deal with. But even before you

(02:12):
get to the unions, once they became a civil servant,
they can only be terminated for cause, and then even
for cause is much more convoluted than it would be
in the private sector. There's a whole litany of very

(02:34):
specific reasons. One person I've told you the story of
bazillion times about the one individual I was able to
fire quickly who had been there for twenty some years
because one of the first things was brought to my
attention was the Inspector General. You know, because they they
have ways of auditing and monitoring what people are doing

(02:55):
on their government computers. And this guy spent I'm not exaggerating,
He's literally spent eight hours a day, five days a week.
He'd clock in, he'd go to his little cubicle and
he watched porn all day. That's all he did for
days on end. I'm talking about, you know, for for
a full year, that's all he did was watch porn.

(03:16):
I mean, how much porn can you watch? Seriously, that
guy even though it still took me probably I'm just
gonna guess maybe up to six months. Still took me
six months to firing. He's represented by a union. So
you have all the administrative hearings you have to go through,
you have to go through all of the personnel systems,

(03:38):
you have to go through all the merit board requirements,
and then once you go, once you pass all of
those hurdles, then you can actually issue the termination papers.
So for something that in the private sector, you would
be terminated on the spot. For something that would I
could do on the spot in the private sector, took

(03:58):
me six months to do. In the government, all I'm
trying to do is give you a realistic picture of
a realistic picture, so we can help you manage expectations. Now,
don't get me wrong, I have high expectations to see
some radical change in the government. But it's not going

(04:23):
to happen on January twenty first. It's not going to
happen on March twenty first. It's going to take time.
All of these people that had been appointed. Again using
myself as an example, So the day I walk in

(04:47):
as Undersecretary, I have a permanent staff just for my office.
I'm not talking about anything else except my personal office.
I already have a staff in place of thirty people,
thirty people that I didn't choose, thirty people that I

(05:08):
didn't pick, but thirty people who had who had been
assigned to the Undersecretary's office, who were everything you could imagine, schedulers, secretaries,
liaisons to state and local governments. I mean, just I'd

(05:29):
had to here in just daydream about all the different positions,
and I would say, of those thirty some odd people,
ninety percent of them were Democrats, one hundred percent of
them were civil servants. And so I had to figure
out one how many, if any of them I wanted

(05:52):
to keep. That takes time. You can't just what you could.
But then how do you manage your office? Because the
undersecretary needs a staff. You've got to have people to
carry out your orders. To carry out your decisions. You
have to have people to maintain your schedule, to maintain
your your schedule with the White House, your schedule with

(06:15):
the CIA, your schedule with the Hill. You have to
have all of these people to do all of these things.
And I'm facing thirty people in the conference room, none
of whom I know, and I realize, okay, who in
this room could I even partially trust to at least

(06:37):
start telling me? Who are the other twenty nine people
in this room? Who are they, where do they come from?
How long have they been here? And and for me,
the most important question was what were they doing before
they got this job? Because, as I've told you, one
of the things that occurs in the federal government that

(07:00):
nobody wants to talk about for some reason. And why
Republicans don't do this is beyond me. But it's called burrowing,
and what you do is and the Clinton administration was
absolutely phenomenal at this. They would take their political appointees.
And now Bill Clint knew he was lame. Dug didn't

(07:25):
know whether, In fact, he didn't care whether it was
going to be Al Gore or George W.

Speaker 3 (07:29):
Bush.

Speaker 2 (07:30):
He didn't care. He just knew he was leaving, so
he wanted to make sure that his people ended up
with permanent civil service jobs. So six months to a
year out from January twentieth of two thousand and one,
they would start burrowing them. They would convert them from
a political appointee. They would have to go through all

(07:52):
the processes, but boy, they were smart at doing it.
They would speed up, they would shorten the process, and
they would convert them from a political appointee to either
a GS ten or a GS twelve, or a GS fifteen,
or to the senior Executive Service. They would short circuit
that entire process and get those people in there. So
now I'm stuck with and I'll there's one person in

(08:13):
particular who was actually worked in the Clinton White House
for a while, and she was on my staff, and
so her name was Margaret. And I took Margaret to
lunch and sat down and talked to her about Explain

(08:36):
to me how all the other people are. How many
of them came from are like you that burrowed in
that was a political appointee and now become a permanent
member of the bureaucracy. Oh, probably all of them. Some
of them are career civil servants who have been here
for you know, ten or fifteen years, and you know

(08:58):
precede Bill Clinton. Uh, maybe you know might bee a
few of them who actually worked for George H. W. Bush. Okay, well,
I need I need the names and I and I
need a summary of how long they've been here and
how they got them to the positions they were so
I could figure out literally who can I trust and
not trust. I took a gamble with her. Now, the only

(09:24):
reason I took a gamble with her was because it
was it would be able for me to verify the information,
you know, the spreadsheet she gave me. It would be able.
It would be pretty easy for me to verify by
going to the personnel director and saying, hey, see these names,
verify that this is their date of appointment, and that
how long they've been in this particular position. Blah blah

(09:45):
blah blah. The the amount of time spent doing that
while you're still doing everything else. You're still dealing with
congressional hearings, You're still dealing with individual members of Congress
who want to bend your ear about a particular pet

(10:06):
project they have going on. Plus you have all the
ongoing disasters that you inherit when you go on and
nine to eleven has even occurred yet, and then you
have that piled on on top of you. You have
all of that stuff going on while you're simply trying
to manage and implement George Bush's agenda for your particular

(10:27):
portion of the federal government. It's why for the political appointees,
it's not a nine to five job. It's not even
an eight to five job. It's a twenty four hour day,
seven day a week job. I have the highest respect
for every political appointee, regardless of their skills, their knowledge,

(10:50):
their ability, any of that. I have the highest respect
for them because they are overwhelmed with things to do. Yes,
Guber number ninety two fort nine. I listened to an
interview the Fake by Tucker that dropped last week. I
don't remember the details, but he said there are ways
to work around the red tape of letting government employees go.

(11:13):
He also spoke about getting agencies moved out of DC
and spreading them across the country. It's easy to talk
about that. It's easy to talk about that, but I
called bull you know what on that particular I don't
know what you heard. I haven't listened to the interview.
But let me tell you there are ways to work
around it. But working around it takes time. For example,

(11:38):
one of the ways that I worked around it to
get those people out of my office was to reassign them. Well,
just a reassignment brings in the union. Just a reassignment
brings in the personnel director. Just reassigning if they want to,
brings in the merit board. So you have to go

(11:58):
through all of that process just to get them reassigned
to get them out of your hair. And never forget this.
I can reassign them and I can get them assigned
to like for example, one way I would do it
was some people really wanted some people really did want

(12:19):
to go out into the regional offices because remember there
you had you had the ten FEMA regions, You had
ten ten and we still have ten regions. So some
people might actually say, you know, I really want to
go to Atlanta because Atlanta's home for me. Oh so
if I reassigned you to Atlanta, would you go? Yes, Okay, done.

(12:39):
I can get that done pretty quickly. It doesn't mean
I got rid of them. They're still a member of
the civil Service. I got them out of my hair,
I got them out of my way, I got them
out of the office, I got them somewhere else I
got I got them, you know, eight hundred miles away,
you know, doing whatever they're going to be doing down there.

(13:00):
This just takes time. I got to tell you, I think.
And again I've not listened to the interview, so I
don't know. And apparently you don't need because you weren't
able to give me any specifics about what the THEG said.
But I don't think they understand what they're walking into. Yes,
you can manipulate and you can move, but even the

(13:21):
manipulation and the moving and the reassignment, that in and
of itself takes time. Now, I want you to think
about this. So now, this is a new incoming administration.
This is now we've already been going through the transition.
So we're already starting to collect names, just like they're
doing right now. So I'm already trying to pick it out. Okay,

(13:45):
I need some recommendations for you know, a chief of staff,
a couple of deputy chiefs of staff, for a general counsel.
I need recommendations for this and this all that has
to go through a White House Personnel office and goes
through the Transition Office, goes first through the Transition office
than through White House Personnel, so that takes some time.
Everything takes time. It's not like just hey, listen, I've

(14:11):
got this friend that is living in Sacramento and I
want them to come in and I want them to
be my deputy chief of staff or policy. Okay, Well,
they have to be cleared by the Transition Office, and
because they're going to be working directly as for me,
they're going to have to get clearances, so that takes time.

(14:33):
Then they have to be onboarded by White House Personnel Office.
That takes some time. Now none and none of that
involves any sort of Senate confirmation. That's just internal stuff.
But imagine that I want, for example, a a general
counsel or I want an assistant secretary that might be

(14:59):
that might be acquire Senate confirmation. If if you're the
one that I want to be my assistant secretary for
legislative affairs, and it requires Senate confirmation, you have to
be vetted by the White House, you have to be
vetted by the FBI for your clearance, and then once
all of that's done, then your packet's put together, and

(15:22):
that's sent to the appropriate committee at the US Senate.
The US Senate, on their own time, will take up
that packet, and the committee will vote to approve your nomination.
And once that committee approves the nomination, then it has
to go to the full Senate for a vote. So
my point being that doesn't happen in a week. That

(15:44):
usually happens in a month or two. So I'm just
trying to temper everyone's expectations that on January twenty first,
the day of the inauguration, you're going to see this
wholesale chain, because it ain't going to occur. Now, let's
talk about Musk and Ramaswami and their so called Department

(16:08):
of Government Efficiency.

Speaker 4 (16:12):
A little boy, you're not going to like this, Mike,
Regarding civil service employees, how easy is it or difficult
to lay them off? Say your department has a budget
reduction and you had to cut your staff from thirty
to twenty five. How difficult is it to lay off
five of your staff?

Speaker 2 (16:29):
Was was that your text message? Because that's exactly where
I was headed fifty nine hundred, Michael, Why can't the
Trump administration just doing across the board ten percent layoff.
Oh they could, they could. Trump could announce that there
is going to be a reduction in force of ten
percent of the entire federal bureaucracy, and then the fund begins.

(16:53):
Because all of that is regulated by both the policies,
the rules and regulations of the Office of Personnel Management
and by Federal Statute Title five. I think it's section
thirty five oh one through something. But Title five has

(17:15):
all the process by which you do what's called in
the federal government. It's not called a layoff. It's called
a riff, a reduction in force. But to do a riff,
you can't just say, okay, every department, at every secretary,
you're hereby authorized the President requires you to lay off

(17:35):
ten percent of your workforce. Okay, that just starts the process. Again.
I'm just trying to temper expectations because once you make
the decision to implement a rift, now you have to
take into consideration which employees get rift, because you have

(17:56):
to take into consideration their tenure. Veterans Preference says they're
total credible federal service time in both the civilian and
the uniformed services. All of their performance ratings. And then
while every agency has a right to decide what positions
are going to be abolished, you then have the issue

(18:17):
of because separate Bear with me, I don't want to
play too much lawyer here, but you have to separate
the position from the individual. So you could do it
an across the board riff of you know, and you're
eliminate ten percent of all these positions, But then you
have to take consideration who's occupying that position, because then

(18:41):
you have to take into consideration the type of appointment
they have. Are they senior executive service or are they
a GS level? Are they you know, an appointee, are
they consultedly a contractor all of those things. You have
veterans preferences, You have the total time they have because
you have to give them credit for if they came
from the military, you have to give them credit for

(19:03):
their military service, including also any other civilian service. You
have to look at their performance ratings so you can
eliminate the position, but it doesn't mean you've eliminated the person,
because the person, based upon the union contract and based
upon all of those actors I just told you, may
be entitled to avoid the rift and go somewhere else.

(19:26):
So their position may get elimited, eliminated, but the person
doesn't get eliminated. So you have to you have to go,
even if you're trying to eliminate a person. But don't
ever say that because unless you have cause to do that.
But if you're doing a riff and you and you're
doing a rift because you want to get rid of

(19:48):
those ten people, well that's going to cause you all
sorts of lawsuits and it's going to take you years
to get rid of them. I'm just trying to paint
a picture that says, yes, we all want these changes,
and we all expect and I think we will get
these changes. But I just have this gut feeling that
everybody's thinking that, oh my god, Trump's in fact, Trump's

(20:10):
just landed at Andrews Air Force Base and the revolution
has begun. Well, no, the revolution is going to take time.
That's all I'm asking you to consider. Which gets us
back to Pete heggsas and Christinome and the Vague and
Elon and all these other people that have been that
are being nominated. I want you let's just pick them.

(20:35):
Pete Heggs for a moment, so there's really no doubt
in my mind that Pete will be confirmed by the
US Senate. I had no doubts about that whatsoever because
Republicans control the Senate. This is someone that Trump wants,
and so the Senate's going to give it to him.

(20:58):
But if he was announced yesterday, that means that the
transition team and I think Trump's already named the head
of the White House Personnel Office. I'm not sure of that,
but I think he has now all of that vetting,
including the collection of all of his tax records for

(21:19):
the past twenty years, all of the information in all
of his personnel files from all of his military service,
all of the information everything that he has to fill
out for all of his clearances, all of his workplaces,
all the places he's lived, all of the lawsuits including
all the divorces he's been involved in. Everything. All of

(21:40):
that has to be compiled and put together and then
vetted by lawyers in the White House Counsel's Office before
it even gets sent to the Senate, which is why
Trump's trying to do all this stuff now so that
those will hopefully land on the senator's committee desk by

(22:01):
inauguration day. If not before, they can't do anything with
it before, but they at least have the folders and
start looking at them, and then they can schedule the hearing,
and they can hold the hearings, and then they can
hold a vote, which again gets us to the point
about why it's important to have a Senate majority leader
who understands how important it is to get these confirmations
done as rapidly as possible. But let's just take Pete

(22:23):
again for an example. Let's say that on January twentieth,
the Senate Committee, the Senate Armed Services Committee meets and
they're going to start considering Pete Higgs's nomination. Well, he
has to testify, and then they well, first he has

(22:44):
to have a sponsor, which shouldn't be hard to find,
so they'll get, you know, Tim Scott or somebody to
be a where's Pete is he from Texas? So they'll
get Corn and her Cruz to sponsoring, and then they'll
go before the hearing the commit the committee. They'll hold
a hearing, he'll testify. All the senators, Republican and Democrat,

(23:07):
will get to ask questions that hearing. Because it's the
Department of Defense, one of the one of the if
not the most important appoint appointments that he's going to make.
And so that hearing is going to take probably a
couple of days and then has to get scheduled for
a full vote before the Senate, and then they have
to vote on it, and then he gets to take office.

(23:31):
So who's running the Pentagon in the meantime, Well, that's
why Trump wanted this authority to start putting in recess appointments. Now,
I'm not going to go into all of the minutia
about a recess appointment, but I question whether he can
make a recess appointment when he's not yet inaugurated, because

(23:54):
only a president can make a recess appointment. And Donald
Trump is not president until he takes the oath of
office on January twentieth of twenty twenty five. So who's
running the Pentagon? Well, right now, it's Lloyd Austin, And
if Lloyd Austin decides to leave early, it'll be his deputy.

(24:16):
And if his deputy leaves early, it'll be somebody that
Biden will appoint as an acting Secretary of Defense until
Pete Hegsas gets appointed, or until Trump gets inaugurated and
he can put a recess appointment in there until Pete
gets his confirmation completed. Do you get the picture? Do

(24:41):
you get the idea that all I'm all I'm trying
to do here is described to you. That we're all
giddy about the fact that we won the trifecta. But
just take a deep breath and don't shoot the messenger.

(25:02):
You know that this idea better riff. It's a great idea,
but that in and of itself. Hey, you don't believe me.

Speaker 3 (25:11):
Do this.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Get on your Google machine. Type in five the number
five USC thirty five oh one. I don't know what.
I don't know what I'll pull up. I probably should
have checked that before I told you that, But I'm
pretty sure that's the title that controls riffs, because we
tried to do some riffs. Title five five us CO.

(25:36):
Section thirty five oh one. And you'll see, Now, those
are just the statues. That's just the law. Don't forget.
The law also encompasses all the rules, regulations, and policies
that are adopted by the Office of Personnel Management. And
then come back and tell me, oh, yeah, we're going
to do a riff. We'll have it done by January
twenty first, no, you won't. No, you won't. Now, Well,

(26:00):
having said all of that, I don't want you to
be disheartened, because we won we want and we're going
to have great changes. They're just not going to happen
as rapidly as everyone's going to want them to happen,
and there'll be some bumps along the road. Well and

(26:23):
in again, I'm just picking on Pete Haggs just because
that's probably the most important appointment that he's made to date,
other than maybe the CIA director. We don't know what's
in Peach's files. We don't know what's in there until
they start doing the vetting process, because it's happened before

(26:47):
people start going through the vetting process and something pops up,
or a senator, a senate staffer starts looking through someone's file,
brings something to the attention of a senator, particularly a
Democrat senator, and suddenly there's a boom, there's a flag
on that appointment, and now they're back to square one.

(27:07):
This is the way the government works. So yes, time
is of the essence. Trump is moving rapidly. Trump's doing
all these appointments rapidly and trying to get everything done
as quickly as possible. I'm just trying to temper your expectations.
That's all I'm doing.

Speaker 3 (27:28):
I'll be right back, Michael. I think it's wonderful that
Trump is beginning to do something about this, and once
he starts by appointing these people, at least the process
will be begod and maybe the culprits will be shivering
in their timbersion or whatever the phrase is, and things

(27:52):
will take a long time, but at least they're on
the road to recovery, exactly.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
And so I think that you you've got the right perspective,
and the correct perspective from my point of view is yes,
we've accomplished something great. I just worry based on things
that I see the talking heads on Fox News that

(28:22):
are just giddy about, Oh my gosh, this whole revolution
is coming about, and you know we're going to For example,
somebody asked me on let me fucking find the twenty
nine sixty five. Goober asks Michael, regarding the move to
close the Department of Education, How does that affect the

(28:43):
federal employees? Do they disappear at What do you do
with all those employees that they shut down the Department
of Education? Well, let's think about just shutting down the
Department of Education. The President can't do that. He has
no that is a congressionally established cabinet department. President didn't
stabish I mean, you know, Carter may have asked for it,

(29:05):
but Congress is the one that authorized it. So Congress
would have to be the one to abolishit. Congress would
then have to figure out a transition. We keep using
the word transition a lot, but you cannot literally just

(29:25):
shut down the Department of Education. Let's say Congress we
got majorities, and let's say the majority in the House
in the Senate votes on January twenty first, to eliminate
the Department of Education. Well, several things will have to happen. One,
they would have to stop all current funding, except they

(29:48):
would have to continue some funding because you would need
those employees to wind down the department because they have
programs that are ongoing, programs that fund state and local
school districts and fund other stupid programs I think are
totally worthless, and so you're going to have to start

(30:08):
winding down those programs, which means you're going to have
to coordinate with fifty different departments of education in the states,
whatever relationships or contracts you have with existing school boards
or existing state education departments. So you have all of
those contracts that you're going to have to start terminating

(30:29):
and unwinding. You have all the grants that you're going
to have to start terminating and unwinding. Then you're going
to have to start doing all the process of eliminating
and ripping all of those employees, of which Congress is
going to have a lot of say in how that's done. Now,
I agree, I think the Department of Education ought to

(30:49):
be abolished. I think that should be if we want
to see a real revolution, eliminate the Department of Education
and abolish it on January twenty first. But that doesn't
mean it's goneand January twenty first. That's the only point
that I'm trying to make. You have existing contracts, you
have existing appropriations. You can't just arbitrarily enter into a

(31:13):
contract and then just say now, of course, it depends
upon the termination and termination clauses in the contract. It
depends upon all the contractual agreements that you've entered into
with the grant. So you have all of those things
that you have to comply with in order to eventually
terminate that grant or terminate that contract. So it's a

(31:35):
horribly see this gets back. Let's just let's do an
out of body experience for a moment. This country, and
too many of our citizens had become so accustomed to
just this gigantic morass of a bureaucracy that rules over
our lives that we just think, oh, we can just

(31:56):
snap our fingers and it disappears, and it does not.
It's so entrenched that to unwind that is going to
take time. My heart disappears tomorrow, Well, we got to
deal with the contract on this building for extent. You
gotta deal with my contract